Do We Construct Nature?

"See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself above the London cloud bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings, in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!"

 Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of Four (Conan Doyle)

In 19th Century English, Nature was a capitalized proper noun with great significance for science, but during the 1920's and 1930's, it became very fashionable to beat down on such metaphysical forms of interpretation and explanation. Most concrete statements of this stemmed from the work of a radical group of intellectuals in Vienna who started an intellectual movement that became known as logical positivism. The positivists believed that science must be based on a priveleged form of explanation where knowledge is derived from statements of fact verified by observation. They detested subjective and vitalist explanations of nature and consciousness, deriding metaphysical thought as mere supersition, unverifiable by the supreme methods of logic.

Physics was the archetype of positivist science, the kind all other sciences should aspire to. But in the 21st century, biology has taken on the central role in our philosophical worldview with DNA as the arbiter of chemical information processing and evolution, spanning the entire range of observable phenomenon, from carbon chemical symmetries to countless deplorable pornographies of evolving animal behaviour. Perhaps one of the best things about biology for philosophers, is that it turns out to be a model for science itself: evolution, selection, mutation are concepts that can be applied to the competition of scientific theories as well as living organisms. This might all have continued as one big empiricist wet dream if certain philosophers hadn't pointed out that our observations are always coloured by our theories. And it seems as if this observational entanglement seems to percolate all the way up to the most macro levels of our worldview: our current concepts of the universe are based on the 20th century ideas of information processing and computation, just as 18th century concepts of the universe were based on clockwork machinery and 19th century concepts were based on heat engines.

Many mainstream physicists have yet to realize what it means for the philosophical wheel to turn full circle. It has, after all, been rolling for several thousand years, and yet the basic questions are still the same. But now the classical debate between materialist and vitalist theories of nature has been fully eclipsed by a speculative high technology multi-billion-dollar dog-and-pony freakshow that can be colloquially referred to as the hunt for the Higgs Boson. That naughty little Boson hasn't been found in any of the multi-million dollar experiments so far. Wonder where he's hiding eh? I heard they need him to prove gravity or something.

So I am hiding in the shadows, studying the philosophy of science and watching the physicists closely. When their big tunnel of love comes online next year, I'll be very interested to see if little Higgesey decides to come out and party under the sensors. If not, I think some very serious questions may need to be raised about the coherence of what they are doing. In this potential upheaval, there will be unprecedented opportunities for mad and ambitious young scientists to develop completely new ways of thinking about the world. But this will only be possible with a thorough synthesis and assimilation of the history and philosophy of conceptual content in science.

The positivists tried to eliminate conceptual content from the philosophy of science. To them, theories had to be strictly tied to observation statements. These statements were designed to lock into a constructive logical system that would provide a universal basis for all science. Popper's criteria of falsification flipped this around, but it was still driven purely from a logical methodology. An incredibly sound and useful demarcation, but it doesn't account for the leaps of creative inspiration that are so important in the formulation of some of the most significant scientific theories. Unlike the visceral intuition that guides most people's understanding of the classical laws involving matter and forces, much of modern physics is highly abstract and mathematical, and incredibly difficult to explain with a unifying conceptual picture. Some physicists are now questioning whether or not the demands of falsifiability are too strict for physics to operate under, yet the problem of conceptual coherence is often avoided, perhaps because it is disturbingly subjective. Unfortunately, arguments against falsification can't go particularly far. There seem to be no better alternatives to the process of actually observing reality and drawing conclusions based on experience. Empiricism bites, and without it we have no real foundation for the reliable knowledge claims we have come to expect from science.

A lot of science and engineering can go on by ignoring philosophical issues and blackboxing the areas of complexity and controversy. But sooner or later, the reality of the deep philosophical puzzles will have to be faced:

1. Is mathematics in a sense, "out-there" in the world, or do we construct it, based on our brains ability to form internal logical structures?
2. Are our theories about nature descriptions of real things? Does the universe actually contain objects in themselves?
3. Does god exist, in the sense that everything in the universe is connected by an essential spiritual force?

You wouldn't be far wrong if you assume that these three puzzles might really be diverging aspects of the same essential problem. It would be easy to rubbish that third question if it wasn't for the currently raging debates about creationism (I thought this was something of the past, but apparently not) and the fact that religion has never been so popular in the world as it is today. Just as those who take the bible literally would do well to consider that god is not religion but a spiritual bond, those who believe that the universe is a massive 3 dimensional bubble filled with lifeless bits of bouncing matter might want to wonder why the vibrating modes of existence that we call atoms more closely resemble harmonic frequencies than orbiting billiard balls.